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Victory!

* Anatole Kaletsky: Associate Editor of The Times* Professor Norman Stone: Professor of International Relations and Director of the Russian Centre at Bilkent University, Ankara.* Alexei Pushkov: Anchor of the most popular Russian TV programme “Post Scriptum” which has considerable influence on Russian public perception of international events.

Speakers against the motion:

* Edward Lucas: Central and Eastern Europe correspondent for the The Economist and author of The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces Both Russia and the West (2008).

Friday, February 23, 2007

PUBLISHING the names of serving spies is a huge taboo in the intelligence world. It endangers not only them, but anyone they have met. You might do it to your enemies on occasion, but never to your own side.

Yet Poland's official report on the recently disbanded WSI (military intelligence service), has named dozens of current and former agents including some in highly sensitive places such as Afghanistan. That has provoked derision and alarm in equal measure, for at first sight the gains seem elusive and the costs high. Serving diplomats, their cover blown, have hurried home. They include the ambassadors to Austria, China, Kuwait and Turkey. At least ten of the names, including the military attaché in Moscow, are fiercely contested.

The aim was to highlight the WSI's role in the cosy business and political arrangements that took root in Poland following the collapse of communism. The report does raise disturbing questions about both Russian penetration of the WSI, and its involvement—perhaps with Kremlin help—in the energy industry among others. It strongly suggests a past failure of political oversight. But the seemingly muddled and inconclusive material published so far falls far short of the “atom bomb”, proving conspiracy and subversion, promised by its author, Antoni Macierewicz. It is puzzling too that some scandals of past years are treated so sketchily.

Mr Macierewicz is undaunted, as are his sponsors, Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the twins who are respectively Poland's president and prime minister. “This was one of our most important goals and it was worth it,” said the prime minister. Government defenders say the criticism comes from those with a vested interest in maintaining the old order. No real secrets have been leaked, as the Russians already knew the WSI inside out.

Mr Macierewicz, who—remarkably for a political appointee—runs the new military counter-intelligence service, insists the best is yet to come. Many leads remain to be chased; missing and destroyed documents have slowed things down. Maybe so—though it is hard to argue that Polish political life will benefit from yet more months of leaks, innuendo and suspicion.

WHEN the cold war ended, Sweden felt able to turn a furtive friendship with its fellow neutral Finland into a close economic, political and security one. Now it wants also to cosy up to its western neighbour and NATO member, Norway. Again, the motivation is Russia—but fear, not rapprochement, is the spur.

The Swedes' immediate worry is a planned Russian-German gas pipeline on the Baltic seabed. That is littered with dumped chemical weapons and other munitions dating from the second world war, and home to sensitive submarine defences built during the cold war. A planned pumping station (see map) close to the Swedish shore has infuriated the country's defence establishment, which fears it will be used for Russian electronic espionage or other mischief-making. Such concerns give Sweden no legal basis for blocking the pipeline, but it is trying to delay it on environmental grounds.

A combative radio interview by the Russian ambassador to Sweden, Alexander Kadakin, has failed to allay fears. He repeatedly described critics of the pipeline as “idiots”, arguing: “why should we need [another] spy station when we already have the real-time capability to read the number plates of every car in Stockholm?”

Last week Mats Engman, head of Sweden's influential MUST military intelligence and security service, publicly gave warning of the “Russian bear's...greater self-confidence and increased freedom of action.” In the same week another top military thinker, Stefan Gustafsson, said: “the strategic map has changed. We must now analyse what resources are required at home if tension in the north were to grow.” He noted that Russia's economic prosperity was financing a sharp rise in defence spending.

Sweden and Norway are the military heavyweights of Scandinavia (Finland maintains a well-trained army with a stellar record, but has only a vestigial navy and air force). General Håken Syrén, commander of the Swedish armed forces, said recently that “Swedish and Norwegian security and defence interests are running closer than ever...and often shared.” Sweden already shares its radar surveillance data closely with Finland and is discussing other military monitoring projects. It now hopes to match these by similar co-operation with Norway.

However much diplomats may wince, there is no disguising that all this aimed at only one country: Russia. The hottest issue is energy. Norway hopes that a newly hawkish Sweden will be supportive in its long-running dispute with Russia over the two countries' northern sea border (see map). At stake are the “High North's” lucrative, and still largely unexploited, oil and gas reserves.

A big sign of intensified co-operation would be if Norway chose to upgrade its air force with the Gripen JAS-39 fighter, made by Sweden's Saab. A Swedish television investigation this week claimed to have unearthed evidence of bribes of 1 billion kronor ($142m) paid to support the sale of 24 Gripen jets to the Czech Republic. A second programme next week will make similar allegations about sales in Norway. That may hold things up a bit.

Unlearning the trusting habits of the past decade will be hard: Sweden's security establishment was run down in years when trade promotion and haggling in Brussels outweighed Russia-watching. Hawks are cheered by the foreign minister, Carl Bildt, a tough-minded and eloquent figure who as prime minister from 1991 to 1994 threw Sweden's weight behind the freedom of the Baltic states.

All this is uncomfortable for Finland, forced by geography into a more cautious stance towards Russia. Finns have never forgotten that they learned of Sweden's decision to apply for membership of the European Union only when they read it in the newspapers. Some wonder if they might get the same nasty surprise about Sweden and NATO.

Thursday, February 22, 2007

DEPENDING on where you are standing, the phrase “two-speed Europe” can be tempting or terrifying. For the people who run many of the continent’s old democracies, it must be very tempting—a device for marginalising all the prickly Poles, hapless Hungarians, sleazy Slovaks, chattering Czechs and baffling Balts who have made the European Union so much more diverse a place in the past couple of years.

If the EU were to fracture, the natural fault-line would be the edge of the euro zone, as Toomas Hendrik Ilves, Estonia’s thoughtful president, has observed (see map, below).

The common currency includes most of old Europe, but excludes most of the new democracies (including his). What would happen to the outsiders?

It would be nice to think, as a worst-case scenario, that the single market would hang together, and that the baker's dozen of countries outside the euro zone would at least remain part of this thriving free-trade area.

They would find themselves in much the same position as Norway and Switzerland do today―bound by the EU's rules and standards for trade and industry, in exchange for free-trade arrangements, but with few of the other main burdens and privileges of EU membership.

Probably, however, the unravelling would go further. The EU already finds it a huge effort to make the Poles, for example, abide by European competition law. Without a seat at the top table in Brussels, no Polish government would allow foreigners to claim full national treatment, especially when it came to buying the country’s big companies. With that, the single market would unravel too.

The already withered carrot of enlargement would look much less appealing. Today the EU can hope to make the politicians of the western Balkans raise their game by talking up the distant prospect of full membership. But who is going to lift a finger to join a two-speed Europe in the slow lane to nowhere?

Another big casualty of a two-speed Europe would be any hope of a tough and coherent policy towards Russia.

A resurgent old Europe would probably be dominated by France, Germany and Italy (assuming Britain, as usual, dithered). These countries tend to see rows with the Kremlin as costly distractions. They view the warnings and grumblings of the Poles and the Balts as mere revanchism.

Given the chance, they would happily strike bargains with Russia on energy and anything else, over the heads of the countries in between. A Russian-German gas pipeline being built on the Baltic seabed is a foretaste of what Poland and the Baltics can expect if a two-speed Europe takes shape.

The ex-communist states’ wobbly finances are propped up in part by the financial markets’ confidence that they will join the euro eventually. If that belief erodes, the halo effect of proximity to rich stable Europe evaporates

This should be a terrifying scenario for the new democracies. You might expect them to react furiously by hastening to adopt the euro, by restoring their reputation as reformers, and by pushing for adoption of the EU's constitutional treaty.

But they aren’t, mostly. And the euro is slipping away from them as the EU’s monetary bosses cook up ever more slippery criteria to limit membership. Slovakia, the new EU member with the best claim to join soon, is likely to be told that its low inflation is “unsustainable”, because it relies on a currency appreciation which will end when Slovakia joins the common currency.

The dangers here can scarcely be exaggerated. The ex-communist states’ wobbly finances are propped up in part by the financial markets’ confidence that they will join the euro eventually. If that belief erodes, the halo effect of proximity to rich stable Europe evaporates. Slow-lane Europe’s bad government, backwardness and weakness will stand starkly revealed. And who will pay then?

MEASURED by scale, dreadfulness or daring, the German campaign in east Africa from 1914 to 1918 can hardly be beaten. Over a vast territory, a small German colonial force, under the extraordinary leadership of General Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck, outsmarted the combined forces of the British, Portuguese and Belgian empires, from the beginning of the war to beyond its end.

By attacking Northern Rhodesia they invaded British territory, the only German forces to do so in the whole war. They improvised everything from artillery (using salvaged naval guns) to quinine (known as Lettow-schnapps). Their opponents carried a disassembled steamer in crates across Africa in order to outgun them on Lake Tanganyika.

It came at a terrible cost. The few soldiers who fought in both Europe and Africa thought the latter far worse. All sides treated Africans abominably. Of 1m porters recruited by the British, 95,000 died. German looting and raiding caused at least 300,000 civilian deaths. Many native casualties simply went uncounted.

This extraordinary story has already been well told in fiction, such as “The African Queen” by C.S. Forester and William Boyd's “An Ice-Cream War”.

Those longing to know every detail of the military campaign will be well-served by Edward Paice's comprehensive history of the war. Others may find it frustrating that the human drama and detail are obscured by a relentless focus on military minutiae and an unfortunate propensity to repeat facts. By the middle of the book the reader feels lost in a seemingly endless wasteland of skirmishes and forced marches. The inadequate maps do not help make sense of the many unfamiliar place names.

But even the author's plodding prose cannot obscure the exciting bits. German efforts to resupply the beleaguered protectorate in east Africa were audacious. The final attempt counts as one of the great feats of early aviation. In 1917 a Zeppelin got as far as Khartoum before turning back—apparently having been tricked by a bogus radio message sent by the British. Yet this astonishing story is crammed into four pages and is missing from the index.

Most annoyingly, the author is inexplicably timid about giving details of personality and character. The retired General Kurt Wahle, who served throughout the campaign (he was visiting his son when war broke out), is described as the oldest combatant of the war—but his age is not given. No proper picture of General von Lettow-Vorbeck is provided, and all details of his private life (was he married?) are omitted. So too is the fact that his admiring British opponents not only invited him to a dinner in 1929, but after the second world war got together to pay him a pension.

POLAND'S fractious, pig-headed government has survived for nearly 18 months, against the expectations of most commentators. Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the identical twins who are respectively president and prime minister, may be disastrous in foreign affairs, but at home life rumbles on fine. Poland took in a record $14.7 billion in foreign investment last year, and the economy is growing at almost 6% a year.

Money is flowing in from Brussels, thanks to Grazyna Gesicka, the diligent regional-affairs minister. The justice system, under a zealot named Zbigniew Ziobro, at least sounds serious about catching the biggest crooks. Communist-era secret-police files—long a source of suspicion and scandal in Poland—are to be opened. The old military intelligence service, the WSI, has been closed down, and a dossier will be published soon showing the reach of its sinister tentacles in business, media and officialdom. The upper reaches of the Kaczynskis' Law and Justice party exude a puritanical rectitude. Its two small coalition partners, once known for their outlandish populism, have been tamed by power.

In the past two weeks, however, the government has shown signs of self-destruction. First to go was Radek Sikorski, the defence minister. He resigned because his military counter-intelligence service was snooping on him, at the behest of its chief, Antoni Macierewicz, a Kaczynski ally. Mr Macierewicz was in charge of liquidating the WSI, but has created a private spy service for the Kaczynskis in its place. The loss of Mr Sikorski, the only minister able to talk sense in English, will merely highlight his ex-colleagues' failings.

Next came the departure of Ludwik Dorn, a deputy prime minister and head of the interior ministry. Known as the “third twin” for his closeness to the Kaczynskis, the brainy and hard-working Mr Dorn wrote a furious open letter to the prime minister, demanding indefinite leave (which was granted). The ostensible reason was a clash with Mr Ziobro.

Two senior foreign-policy advisers have also left. The chaos suggests that the Kaczynskis' grip may be failing. Anybody wanting to survive in the government must be passive, mediocre and loyal, say Poles. One Polish weekly has even compared Jaroslaw Kaczynski to Vladimir Putin, an insult that is both shocking and a shade absurd. Yet Mr Kaczynski's statist, top-down approach and his disregard for the separation of powers do ring some faintly alarming bells.

Even as their enemies become more hysterical, however, the Kaczynskis' supporters are untroubled. Law and Justice is polling a steady 28%, more than it scored in the election of September 2005. It would be rash to write the government off; Jaroslaw Kaczynski has often proved a masterly tactician. Some loyalists even suspect that Mr Dorn's half-resignation is part of a master-plan. Others think the government's troubles are a last-ditch diversion put up by the WSI in its death-throes.

The bigger problem is that, aside from the justice ministry, reform has stalled in Poland. Its public administration remains unwieldy, incompetent and backward. Having booted the old government's cronies out of top jobs in public institutions and state-owned companies, the Kaczynskis have installed their own chums, rather than liberalising and depoliticising. Privatisation has almost stopped. Public purchasing is still deeply corrupt. The Kaczynskis' obsession with the wrongs of the past seems to blind them to what is happening under their noses.

In foreign policy, farce is mixed with tragedy. The Kaczynskis have missed no opportunity to insult Germany—which under Angela Merkel has been trying to be friends. Their conduct of diplomacy is comically incompetent. Any advisers who know anything about abroad attract mistrust, and often dismissal. Hardly any officials are left who understand the European Union, for example, a grave matter with tricky negotiations over the EU constitution about to start again.

Economics attracts similar disdain. The sole goal of economic policy was to remove Leszek Balcerowicz, author of Polish free-market reforms in the 1990s, from the central bank. Poland's most urgent task is to use the boom to cut the budget deficit. Taxes on labour are too high, squeezing wages and increasing the incentive to emigrate. A million-plus Poles have done just that since Poland joined the EU, creating widespread labour shortages.

Vengeful, paranoid, addicted to crises, divided and mostly incompetent, the government survives mainly because the economy is strong and the opposition is feeble. Neither will last for ever.

Right question, wrong answerFeb 15th 2007From Economist.comThe job of Poland's government is reform, not revengeGIGGLING at Poland's government for its incompetence, provincialism and narrow-mindedness is to miss the point. The crusty, prickly conservatives of Law and Justice—chiefly the Kaczynski twins, who hold the offices of president (Lech) and prime minister (Jaroslaw)—did not come to power thinking that they would make Poland a diplomatic powerhouse, or a beacon of liberal economic reform and modernity.

Their aim is different: to purify Poland of what they see as the shameful sleaze of the past 17 years. In their eyes, a sinister combination of crooked businessmen, corrupt officials and lawless spooks has consolidated economic and administrative power, usurping what should have been an anti-communist revolution. This putative coalition of post-communist interest groups and clans is commonly called, in Polish, the uklad (pronounced ook-wad), a word which can be translated both as "deal" and "establishment". That raises three questions. First, does the uklad really exist? Second, is it harmful? Thirdly, are the Kaczynski brothers' tactics in dealing with it correct? Answering the first definitively is hard. It is not as if the uklad has an office, meetings or formal membership list. What is clear is that no attempt was made in 1989 to stop such a thing developing. The "thick line" that was drawn under the past allowed a seemingly peaceful formal transfer of power.

Ex-spooks and ex-apparatchiks went gleefully into business, and have thrived for reasons that go beyond their business acumen. A successful, even a disgraceful, career in the Polish People's Republic has proved no bar to success in the private or public sectors. The military intelligence service, the WSI, seems to have been a law unto itself once its communist masters retreated. So the uklad is, at least, a useful metaphor. Does it matter? The trade-off is between peace and purity. Excluding the old regime's people might have been dangerous. Giving them a stake in the new system made it stable. Yet their unfair advantages, of money and connections, rankle with honest citizens who never collaborated. It is entirely defensible, then, to argue that Poland should be a country in which old connections matter less, and honesty and hard work matter more. The big question—and the weakest point in the Kaczynskis' approach—is how to get there. One way is to use the criminal justice system to attack those with dubious pasts. Pilfering of state assets, insider trading, bribery in public procurement: there is plenty of material. But this route is risky. Whom do you pick on, and where do you start? The great danger is of a vindictive, arbitrary witch-hunt, where communist-era tactics of denunciation and punishment are used against those whose main crime is being unlucky, not wicked. That seems to be the way that the Kaczynskis are going, both with their enemies and even—surprisingly—with their friends. In recent weeks a distinguished presidential adviser was fired humiliatingly because of a single document signed under great stress during the communist era, an act which he had immediately admitted to his dissident friends, and repudiated. Another has been ejected from public life because he worked for the WSI as a consultant in the post-communist era. A senior diplomat has been deprived of his promised ambassadorship because his brother worked for Poland's previous president, an ex-communist. Fighting the totalitarian legacy with totalitarian tools is unlikely to work. The way to shake up Poland's crony capitalism is not by selectively hunting down the cronies, but by making it such an open, liberal and competitive society that the old connections no longer count for much. That means more privatisation (and thus less room for manipulation), more deregulation, and welcoming all forms of outside competition. But it is hard to imagine the Kaczynskis humming that tune any time soon.

Saturday, February 10, 2007

THE weapons in this war are not high explosives, nor even gas pipelines, but stories about them. The battlefronts are seminars, think-tanks and dinner parties in the posher parts of London. Not since Alexander Herzen’s day has Britain's capital been party to such arguing over Russia’s future.

The biggest and richest protagonist is the Kremlin, or, more properly the sprawling mass of business and political interests connected with it. Their aim is simple: to rehabilitate Russia’s reputation. Events (they say) have proved the doomsayers wrong. Far from crumbling, Russia is flourishing. Europe, and the world, need its oil and gas. Critics of Russian policy are crazed cold warriors, hypocrites with double standards, agents of Vladimir Putin’s enemies, or all three.

The critics of the Kremlin fall into two main camps. One is ruled by Boris Berezovsky (below, right), an exiled Russian oligarch. He can't outgun the Russian regime pound for pound, but his money is well targeted for maximum damage.

Mr Putin (he argues) is not only a dictator, but a murderous one. The Russia security services organised a bombing of apartment blocks in Moscow in 1999, with many deaths, to create a climate of fear in which their man, Mr Putin, could take power. They assassinate opponents, among them Alexander Litvinenko, a Berezovsky loyalist poisoned with polonium in a London hotel last year.

The other anti-Kremlin camp salutes Mikhail Khodorkovsky (below, left), a one-time oil tycoon, jailed in Siberia on fraud charges that his supporters say are trumped up. This camp has two main tactics: highlighting its backer’s legal plight, and sponsoring academic and think-tank work undermining the Kremlin’s claim to respectability.

EPA

Divided by a common enemy

The two anti-Kremlin camps do not co-operate. Mr Khodorkovsky’s lot regards Mr Berezovsky as the epitome of what went wrong in Russia in the 1990s, and their own man as an emblem of modern business brought down by greedy Kremlin thugs. They shun the Chechen cause; Mr Berezovsky befriends it.

For the Kremlin’s propagandists, Mr Berezovsky is a terrorist sympathiser and Mr Khodorkovsky is a self-serving crook.

The Kremlin has been winning the argument in London’s morally myopic financial world. Russian companies are a spectacularly lucrative line of business for brokers, bankers, lawyers, accountants, and PR-chiks (a wealthy, mainly male species not to be confused with homophonous English “PR chicks”, though the latter benefit too). Pro-Kremlin Russian Londoners have struck up a close friendship with the city's mayor, and sponsor a popular and entertaining winter festival in Trafalgar Square.

Spent well (as with the winter jamboree), or badly (as it otherwise mostly is), the tide of money washing through London is proving the Kremlin’s best ally. “Nobody wants a reputation as a Russophobe these days: it’s bad for business,” says one Sovietologist-turned-banker.

But the opposition camps have their successes. The Litvinenko murder was a disaster for the Kremlin. The British media gleefully unleashed every cold-war cliché—a kneejerk reaction, perhaps, but one that was justified subsequently by Russian officialdom’s sullen and obstructive behaviour towards British investigators.

This week a book called “Blowing up Russia”, written five years ago by Litvinenko and a co-author, Yuri Felshtinsky, is being published in Britain for the first time. It argues that there was official collusion in the Moscow apartment-block bombings. A press conference to launch the book was cancelled at short notice because, it was said, of unspecified threats to Mr Felshtinsky’s life.

The hi-jacking of Shell’s Sakhalin gas fields, and the looming likelihood of a similar raid on the mighty BP, also hurt the Kremlin’s cause. But the mood in moneyed London is still largely positive towards Russia. In thinking London it is increasingly negative. The battle continues.

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

POLAND’S defence forces, unlike those of most European countries, are tough, numerous and enthusiastic. So the resignation on Monday February 5th of Radek Sikorski, the country’s suave and forceful defence minister, is more than a quirky turn in the history of a notoriously eccentric government. Poland’s soldiers are in both Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as other hotspots—and unlike some token members of international coalitions, they do real jobs. Poland is also a planned site for an American “star wars” missile-defence base.

Nobody is talking publicly about the reasons for the resignation. On departure, Mr Sikorski praised Poland’s prime minister and president (the identical twins Jaroslaw and Lech Kaczynski). The government has spoken of “reservations” about his work. But the outlines are clear.

The main battle is about who controls military intelligence. Mr Sikorski has been wrestling for months with Antoni Macierewicz, a close ally of the Kaczynskis who was installed as deputy defence minister to oversee the liquidation of Poland’s WSI military-intelligence service. Depending on whom you believe, this was a nest of traitors and gangsters, a decent outfit full of professionals, or a mixture of the two.

Mr Macierewicz certainly takes the first view. He has replaced the WSI with two new services, one for spying, one for spy-catching. He claims to have rooted out scores of secret WSI collaborators in the media, business and officialdom, and is about to publish a list—maybe as soon as next week—which will expose their malign influence over the past 18 years of post-communist Poland. His supporters reckon that Mr Sikorski was too soft. That certainly chimes with the Kaczynskis’ view of Poland: a land bedevilled by sleaze and treachery.

The alternative view is that the influence of the WSI is wildly overstated and that Mr Macierewicz is cynically feeding the Kaczynskis’ paranoia. Mr Macierewicz has now taken personal charge of the new military counter-intelligence service and is using it—critics say—as a personal intelligence-gathering outfit for the Kaczynskis. That, coupled with a witchhunt against experienced officers, has endangered Polish national security, especially the troops serving abroad.

Separating imagined ghosts and real demons is tricky. Mr Sikorski had several times threatened to resign if Mr Macierewicz’s influence was not curbed. There are suggestions that Mr Macierewicz had counter-attacked by ordering the collection of dirt on Mr Sikorski himself. Mr Sikorski fled Poland after the imposition of martial law in 1981, and spent the next decade in Britain, where he gained British citizenship. The communist-era Polish security service thought he must be a British spy; it would be ironic if Mr Macierewicz, an anti-communist witchfinder-general, were to take a road so well-trodden by his foes.

What is clear is that Mr Sikorski’s resignation robs an already troubled government of one of its few ministers with unquestioned practical competence. Since taking power in October 2005, the government has had two prime ministers, five finance ministers, two treasury ministers and two foreign ministers. With Mr Sikorski gone, only two ministers—those in charge of justice and regional development—strike outsiders as worthy of their jobs. Mr Sikorski introduced changes in Poland’s defence establishment such as regular fitness tests and modern IT (ability to use a BlackBerry is a condition of promotion).

Critics may call these changes gimmicky and superficial. But Mr Sikorski was also a rare Polish government figure able to talk convincingly to the outside world. Even supporters of the ruling right-of-centre coalition admit that its foreign policy is startlingly clumsy. The Kaczynskis seem to distrust all foreigners except Americans, and have reduced relations with Germany to a level of icy puzzlement unknown in Poland’s recent history. In European Union meetings, it is almost a laughing-stock.

Mr Sikorski, who used to work at an American think-tank, will continue as a senator in Poland’s upper house of parliament. He will be heard of again: a Polish magazine has even suggested he may be a future president. The shaky coalition government’s future looks rather less assured.

LIKE a Jew becoming a Nazi, was how her relatives saw it. How could a brainy, sensitive woman, exiled from her homeland by a monstrous totalitarian regime that hounded her class and murdered her friends and relatives, become an unflinching supporter of its creed?

That is the puzzling life of the beautiful Sofka Dolgorouky. Born into one of tsarist Russia's grandest families, she escaped from Soviet clutches only to spend the second world war in a Nazi internment camp. Sexually insatiable, she had two husbands and countless lovers, and neglected her children abominably. After all that, she ended up happily but squalidly in a cottage in a remote corner of rural England, defiantly communist to the last.

The story is told by her granddaughter, Sofka Zinovieff, who maintains an appropriate tone of slightly bemused sympathy with her captivating but repellent subject. She retraces her grandmother's footsteps, in Russia, France and Britain, presenting an evocative mix of past and present, partly with her own acute descriptions, and partly from her documentary sources. These include the copious diaries and notes of Mrs Skipwith (née Princess Dolgorouky), the recollections (mostly caustic) from the rest of the family and some revealing files from the British security service, who tracked their exotic Russian target (“outstandingly intelligent, courageous and active”) through the shabby grey world of post-war London.

Like the men in raincoats, Ms Zinovieff fails in the probably impossible task of explaining how someone who had suffered so much from totalitarianism could embrace an ideology that upheld it. The horrors of Soviet policy at home and abroad, exposed time after time from 1917 onwards, gradually destroyed the hopes and convictions of sympathisers with the Bolsheviks' experiment, even in the British Communist Party. But it left her grandmother's faith intact. You couldn't blame Christianity for Torquemada, and you shouldn't blame socialism for Stalin, was her usual answer.

The easy explanation is that her judgment was scarred by the poverty she witnessed in the 1930s, and by living on the fringes of the Holocaust—the Jews in her internment camp perished in Auschwitz. But others who experienced the same horrors became ardent democrats; the princess after the war became an enthusiastic tour-guide to the countries of the communist bloc, even editing a magazine that glorified the Stalinist outpost of Albania.

A second puzzle is that someone so good at making friends was so careless with her relatives. Ms Zinovieff reluctantly concedes that her grandmother was not just chronically unfaithful but wildly promiscuous (“bedding” was her own word for casual sex); worse, her hapless children were left in strange hands for long periods, and then moved with a cruel abruptness that even the kindest biographer can hardly excuse. Her self-absorbed carelessness in that, and towards money, hygiene and much more besides, make it easy to see why her Russian in-laws loathed the turncoat princess. Yet anyone reading about her sizzling charm, guts and literary gifts can't help thinking it would have been fun to know her.

Thursday, February 01, 2007

AT ANY time in the past 12 years it would have been not merely an implausible turn of events, but a sensational one. Alyaksandr Lukashenka of Belarus has denounced Russia, and praised the West.

“We are in the centre of Europe and we must be on normal terms with the East and the West”, he said last week. The previous policy, aiming for a union state with Russia, was all wrong, he continued: “we have been flying on just one wing.”

Never mind that the old one-winged foreign policy was his own creation. Never mind that his regime has murdered, bullied, beaten and blustered its way to international isolation for more than a decade. Now he is citing Finland, Sweden, Germany, France, even Poland as commendable economic models.

The prospect that Belarus may be emerging from its black hole is a tantalising one. There is a precedent, of sorts. President Vladimir Voronin of Moldova came to power as a Communist leader determined to make his divided, dirt-poor country into another Cuba, perhaps even joining Russia and Belarus in their union state. But he soon turned into a moderate social democrat, suspicious of the Kremlin, and determined to push Moldova to the West (a course for which the West has given him shamefully little support).

Will the same happen with Mr Lukashenka (shown below, left, with President Vladimir Putin of Russia)? As Vladimir Socor of the Jamestown Foundation points out: “Lukashenka’s overtures are marred by his difficulty finding an idiom understandable to a Western audience”.

EPA

It was quite nice knowing you

That’s putting it mildly. The Belarusian leader is a wild-eyed veteran of the collective farms, a museum-quality homo sovieticus whose pro-Kremlin sentimentality and do-it-yourself authoritarianism are matched only by a volatile temper and crudity of manner. Anyone who has grown used to Mr Lukashenka's cynical rule will find it hard to nurture any hopes of a change.

The comparison with Moldova is only partial, moreover. Whatever his views on foreign policy, Mr Voronin was no authoritarian. Moldova, for all its problems, is a model of Athenian democracy compared to Belarus. Mr Lukashenka’s Damascene conversion to the joys of the Western model have not brought any change in his repressive domestic policies. The recent local elections were a farce, with most opposition candidates and their supporters intimidated into withdrawing.

Previous tiffs with the east and flirtations with the West on the part of Belarus have always ended in business (with Russia) as usual. But this time the rhetoric is certainly stronger.

Bruised by his recent brawls with Russia over oil and gas supplies, Mr Lukashenka’s denunciations of Russian energy imperialism would not sound out of place coming from a Pole. The Belarusian boss says he wants Western companies to buy stakes in his country’s energy infrastructure.

A deep opening to the West may be wishful thinking, but nothing should be ruled out. The fundamentals are changing. Russia’s swaggering, clumsy, regional policy is alienating all its loyal ex-Soviet allies—Armenia, the Central Asian states, now even Belarus.

That creates a huge, unexpected and undeserved opening for the West. Handled wrongly, this could be disastrous. Trying to prop up Mr Lukashenka against Russian pressure would make the West look appallingly cynical.

But it should be possible for the West to talk to the Belarusian nomenklatura—the senior officials and businessmen who administer the country. Neither pariahdom nor incorporation into Russia offers an them an attractive future.

In an ideal world, the fractured, weak opposition would unite and sweep Mr Lukashenka and his cronies out of power and into prison. But in the real world, if providing him (and them) with luxurious villas in Montenegro or Cyprus was the price of freeing Belarus from both dictatorship and Russian hegemony, it would look a pretty good outcome.

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Regards

Edward

Bene Merito award

Without my foreknowledge, I was last year awarded the Bene Merito medal of the Polish Foreign Ministry. Although enormously honoured by this, I have sadly decided that I cannot accept it as it might give rise to at least the appearance of a conflict of interest in my coverage of Poland.

About me

"The New Cold War", first published in February 2008, is now available in a revised and updated edition with a foreword by Norman Davies. It has been translated into more than 15 foreign languages.
I am married to Cristina Odone and have three children. Johnny (1993, Estonia) Hugo (1995, Vienna) and Isabel (2003, London)